The Judging Eye (63 page)

They run so fast with so little
light that they see only the kick of the dust and nothing of the hanging haze.
But they know the trail they leave is mortally obvious. They see nothing of
their pursuers—they can scarce see themselves—but they can hear them baying
through the halls: an infernal chorus of shrieks and shrill yapping, frothing
up behind them, outrunning their panicked gait, filtering through the dark
halls about and before them, so that every other moment echoes trick them into
turning or spiralling down ancient stairs.

Once again the horns swell
through the deeps, a yawing menace. The rumble fills them, thins them with
terror, until they become rags blown on a dread wind. The halls and the vaults
and the graven panels flash into sight and fall into oblivion. Men moan and
cry.

They are all sobbers now. Doom
creeps like lead into their limbs, so that they lurch against their own bulk.
Doom ignites the air, so that they hack with furnace lungs. Doom shreds their
thoughts, so that they become flying fragments, souls that break and crumble
with every jerk and turn.

They don't even pause when the
bronze door leaps into the torchlight, but throw themselves against it, wailing
and cursing. It slaps them back. Pokwas drives a spear into the aperture,
begins prying. Mimara stares without breath or thought at the shackled nudes
stamped across it—more Emwama slaves. Galian, Xonghis, and the others turn to
the curtains of blackness behind them, to the concentrating clamour. Lord
Kosoter seizes her by the back of the neck, throws her at the unconscious
Wizard. She needs no explanation. She clutches Achamian's cheeks, sobs at the
rasp of salt against her right palm. "Akka!" she cries. "Akka!
Akka!
We need you!
"

His eyes flutter.

The haft of the spear snaps.
Pokwas shouts something in his native tongue, begins punching blood from his
fists. The dust of their exertions clouds the torchlight, chalks their mouths.

"Akka! Akka, please!"

The roar is palpable, a pang
shivering out from the graven walls. The Chorae leans like an ache against her
heart.

"Here they come!"
Galian
cries.

"Akka!
Akka!
Wake
up! Seju damn you!
Wake up!
"

Then, like a vision, a figure
trots out of the blackness...

Cleric.

The scalpers stumble back,
bewildered and horrified. Awash in Sranc blood, his skin and armour are filmed
in soaked dust. Basalt dark, he looks like an apparition. Cil-Aujas made
animate.

He laughs at the astounded Men,
waves Pokwas from the door. His sorcerous murmur makes a deep-water pop in
Mimara's ears. His eyes and mouth flare white, and something, a flickering wave
of force, shimmers through the air. There is a deafening crack; the bronze
doors fly ajar.

"Time to run," the
Nonman says, his voice miraculously audible through the screeching roar.

With awe too brittle to be hope,
the survivors scramble into the blackness beyond the bronze rim.

***

Down. Down. Down to more
guttural stone.

Gone are the image-pitted walls,
level floors, and barrelled ceilings. They race through rough-hewn tunnels, so
deep, so near the mountain's root, even the air seems compressed. The chapped
rock becomes hot to the touch, like stone just drawn from a fire's perimeter.
And the air
moves
, always hot, always against them, as though they chase
the source of some endless exhalation. A sulphurous tincture bitters their
tongues.

They have entered the
mines
,
she realizes, the toil of a thousand human generations, slaves begetting
slaves, dredging holy nimil for their Nonman masters. And the Sranc host pours
after them, lunging down straights, bursting from bottlenecks, somehow seeing
by bark and scream. They are closing, so much the scalpers can hear the whisk
of their claws, the clap and scrape of their weapons, the sputum boiling
through their cries. The company is a skiff twirling and slipping on the edge
of a breaking wave. And yet the sheer fury and numbers of their pursuers seem
to slow them, to draw them out in wild ropes. Several times Cleric stops to
face them, leaving the scalpers with the rush-ragged gloom of their only torch.
They hear his laughter booming behind them, the whisper of his sorcery whirring
through their bones, the clack and rumble of unimaginable weights. But the fear
is that the Sranc will range out ahead through the worming of parallel tunnels.
So the Captain veers left and down at every fork, hoping to scatter them in the
mazed deeps.

And the world piles higher and
higher above them.

Her throat leathers for gasping.
The heat drugs her exhaustion, makes her fall as much as run, chasing stride
after drunken stride with her boots. She has fallen behind herself. A sensation
soaks through her, so warm, so consoling it seems sacred, a kind of revelatory
horror, bodiless and floating and so heartbreakingly clear. She has thrown
herself to the ends of terror and will, and nothing remains but to pirouette
and plummet...

She has run to the very edge of
Away.

Forgive me...

The hard things have become
water; only the ground can break her. She falls, more sack than human. She even
lacks the strength to raise her hands. Grit pummels her face. Dust burns her
gums.

The Sranc will have her, and she
will die, speared by their brutalities.

Forgive me, Mother.

She hears shouts, rage wrung
into weeping. She smells myrrh...

She is thrown across a broad
chest, hung like dripping cloth from arms.

"You will not perish for
me!"
She hears his voice rasp. "
I'll carry you across the
doors of hell! Do you hear me? Mimara!
Do you hear me?"

She reaches for his cheek, but
her hand is a stone swinging from a string.

She lets her head carry her eyes
where it will. It jolts and rolls to the rhythm of his exertions—only the
mailed crook of his arm, it seems, prevents it from spinning free. The fissures
across the walls and ceiling scrawl and arc and cross and explode into pits and
crags. The scalpers sprint and toil, their figures bent by tears and angles,
paced by a gliding palm of light. The Wizard slumps between two of them, his
toes scratching furrows through the sand, kicking up against butts of stone.

The passage dips and twists in a
dog-tail bend, ending, miraculously, in a maw of pumpkin orange, waxing as
bright as a horizon-scorching sun. The sight of it stiffens her neck, and for a
time she simply stares, watching the shadows of the company wander across its
luminous expanse.

"Light,"
she
murmurs. "Wh-what?"

"Light," Soma croaks
in affirmation. "We don't know."

"Cleric?"

"Lost. Behind us."

Suddenly she feels the heat
felting the air, making ash out of emptiness. It seems she has always sensed
it, only as a shadow through the slick-skin chill of unconsciousness.

The world sets its hooks deep,
ever drawing souls tight across its infinite contours. Circumstances are
reborn, and hearts are renewed. A spark throbs through her gutted muscles,
returns slack extremities to her will. She glances at the man bearing her—Soma,
stripped of his earnest foolery—and it seems she is a child in a swing.

She knows that he loves her.

***

Light, luxuriant and smoking.
The tunnel opens like the mouth of a battered horn. A hiss that had escaped
their hearing crashes into a gasping roar. An all-burning stench lies in the
air like a sting in the skin. They stumble down slopes of fiery gravel—the bowl
of a ruined amphitheatre, she realizes—staring agog at the ravines that hang in
the distances above them, cliffs piled upon cliffs, their bellies braised in
smouldering crimson. Below them, at the base of the amphitheatre's ruined
tiers, a hemisphere of pillars, roofless cripples, enclose a terrace covered in
wrack. Light rims the brink, blackens heaped foundations. Sulphur crabs the
backs of their throats. The air undulates with heat.

No one speaks as they stagger
toward the edge. In the open, the fact of their losses seem to condemn them.
Wounded, culled of friends and shorn of provisions, the Skin Eaters are little
more than a remnant of what they were.

They squint. They purse their
lips against grins of exhaustion. The heat pricks their teeth. Many fall to
their knees between the pillars, stare across the vista in dismay and horror. A
lake of fire, sparking like iron beneath the smith's hammer. A vast sheet, as
mottled as an old crone's skin, only with skittering fire and belligerent
light.

Soma sets Mimara down and falls
onto all fours, staring into the grit, his back heaving. She crawls to where
Pokwas has dumped Achamian in unceremonious exhaustion. He breathes. He seems
intact. She rolls him onto his back, draws his slack head onto her lap. Her
shoulders yank to her breathing, and she wonders whether she weeps.

"Mimara,"
the
Wizard whispers. She bites her lower lip in joy, blinks tears.

But he thrusts her back, weakly
kicks a heel through the debris. "Chorae," he rasps, his head pulled
back in anguish.

Somehow she has forgotten it,
though it pulls like a fatal fall against her breast. As if attention makes
real, the sudden nothingness of it sucks the voice from her throat.

"Hell!" Pokwas cries
in shrill panic, like a man deciding he is in fact awake. On one knee, he leans
against his tulwar. He lowers his forehead to its pommel. "We've fled too
far—
too deep!
"

Sarl raises his fists to either
side of his skull, claws at his grease-grey hair. There is an infant in his
face, bawling out through skin so wrinkled it seems made of cord and twine. He
cackles through gum-rimmed teeth, weeps.

"It's true!" Xonghis
shouts, eyes round and darting. Only he and Lord Kosoter remain standing. The
wavering air flushes the substance from their figures, makes them wicker thin.
They are writ with filth and Sranc blood.

"This isn't Hell," the
Captain says.

"But it is!"
Sarl
cackles and screams, rocking like a widow beneath her husband's pyre.
"Look!
Look!
" He raises crooked fingers to the spectacle
before them.

Somehow the Captain's sword has
leapt shining from its sheath. Its point tongues the pubis hollow beneath the
sergeant's chin, probes wiry hair. For a moment, Sarl continues rocking,
drawing the shining blade to and fro with his throat. Then he falls very still.

"This," the Captain
grates, "isn't Hell."

"How do you know?"
Galian cries.

"Because," the Holy
Veteran says, his voice so cold it seems the sound should fog or frost. "I
would
remember
."

With a reptilian twitch, he
scores his sergeant's rutted cheek, then turns from his company. He picks his
way across the ruin to the far corner of the terrace, begins descending a stair
cut into the soaring crevasse walls.

For several heartbeats the
scalpers stare after their Captain. No one speaks or moves. Then a bark peals
through the ambient roar, and all eyes jerk to the tunnel above.

Screeching and howling, the
Sranc come, like lice spilling from a dead man's ear. Cleric has fallen, she
realizes with plummeting horror.

Cil-Aujas has slain her last
remaining son.

***

Mimara finds herself racing on
legs woven out of terror, following close behind Galian and Soma, who hold the
semiconscious Wizard between them. They run like the lost, like those whose
hearts rail more against fate than foes. Their peril is fatal and immediate,
yet she stumbles and gasps, stricken with a reeling vertigo. The fall wheels
out to her left, beckoning, staggering...

The lake of fire shimmers across
the distances, a brilliant plate across the bottom of a vast cavern, rutted
like the hollow of a long-dead tree. Soaring basalt faces steep in the heat,
black rimmed in ox-blood crimson. Where the stone leans close to the glowering
surface, across the grottos that hive the farther reaches, fire falls in
curtains and streams. Burning gases blow in skirts across the wavering
expanses. Eruptions spew radiance the height of Momemn's greatest towers.

They
have
fled too far,
too deep. They have passed beyond the rind of the World into the outer
precincts of Hell. There can be no other explanation...

Not lost.
Damned.

Lord Kosoter awaits them on the
first landing, his sword still drawn. She follows his gaze to the bend of the
stair above them. Masses of Sranc stream across the terrace they had occupied
mere moments before, literally hacking at one another to funnel onto the steps.
Around the looming abdomens of stone, she can see hundreds more pouring from
the tunnel's horn-mouth entrance, their white faces pinked by the hellish glow.
The first of the Bashrag wade through them. The cavern roar seems to meld with
their shrieks, to add thunder to their cacophony.

Their Captain's pose says it
all. Away is lost to them. Only death and bitter vengeance remain.